IT and Accounting Pros Can Satisfy Standards and Security Compliance and Reporting with BI Tools

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In the new world of government regulation, the technology (IT) team and accounting team are both required to monitor, manage and report on financial and regulatory and business process compliance. These auditing requirements are meant to ensure that financial, planning and operational systems are adequately controlled and protected. Industry and governmental compliance requirements are meant to ensure the adequacy and integrity of auditing processes and regulatory compliance including business processes designed to ensure compliance, as well as document management, content management, data consolidation, reporting processes and other facets of business, data, customer, user and systems management.

In an environment with numerous systems, databases and data repositories, it can be challenging to gather, monitor, manage and report on these results. The average organization does not have the desire or the funding to add resources, or create additional business process to accommodate these reporting and compliance responsibilities and tasks.

With the right Business Intelligence tools, any organization (whether small or large) can ensure compliance and simplify this management and reporting process so that critical IT and accounting resources are not diverted from other crucial business activities. Audit and control requirements can encompass data design, modeling and analysis, business process management, IT and systems management, data governance, auditing, fraud and risk management, project management methodologies and processes, financial management and reporting, and other factors. That is a lot to cover and for the average organization, there are no additional resources to accomplish these compliance and reporting activities.

Accountants and IT teams can ensure compliance with security, privacy, regulations, business process integrity, data governance, and user access. Business Intelligence solutions can integrate a diverse set of data and information software and solutions and provide a single point of access for review, analysis and reporting. BI tools also allow the organization to establish and manage key performance indicators (KPIs), balanced scorecards, forecasts, reports, personalized alerts and drill-down and drill-through capabilities to analyze data in a way that is meaningful to the task at hand, namely, to manage and report on compliance and controls.

BI tools can transform complex, time consuming compliance analysis and reporting into a well-conceived, well-managed process that is swift, intuitive and accurate, thereby allowing IT and accounting professionals to ensure and achieve compliance and attend to other critical tasks and obligations.

The key to compliance is information. It is imperative that organizations have swift, clear access to the information needed to identify and resolve issues and ensure that there are no surprises. If accounting professionals and IT staff can gather and analyze data and establish alerts and thresholds to notify them of critical developments, the organization can mitigate risk and comply with standards and regulation.